Doctors are calling it a “miraculous recovery” while a little boy’s family is just calling it a “miracle.” Caleb Teodorescu, who is nearly 3, is making a full recovery after nearly drowning in his backyard pool. It was the day after Thanksgiving when firefighters were called out to the home in the 4400 black of Country Gables Drive in Glendale. Caleb had slipped out a back door and ended up into the family’s pool. The boy’s mom, Mihaela, left him with older siblings while she went to the bathroom.She was only gone a few minutes. “I heard them talking and laughing and all of a sudden it dawned on me, I couldn’t hear his voice anymore. So I called out ‘Where’s Caleb?'” she explained. After a few minutes of searching, Mihaela’s young son found Caleb at the bottom of the pool. His mom, who is 5 months pregnant, jumped in to save the boy. A neighbor started CPR but Caleb was unresponsive. For 28 minutes he did not have a heartbeat. “When the emergency crew showed up, no vital signs, his heart wasn’t beating and for all intents and purposes he had died,” said Dr. Corey Philpot with Banner Thunderbird Medical Center. “He was, you might say teetering on the edge of life. … Caleb did not have a good chance of 100-percent recovery and we felt he would be left with some type of disability.”
Still Caleb’s mom and dad believed that the boy would live. “I told the doctor the first night, I know he is going to make a full recovery,” Ovidiu Teodorescu said.
“All of us had a voice inside of us that said ‘It’s going to be all right, it’s going to be all right, don’t despair, it’s going to be all right,'” his wife added. But Caleb was in critical condition. And for a day, doctors kept his body in a cold, hibernatory state to prevent further brain damage.
Four days later he started showing signs of improvement — fingers and toes twitching, pulling at his breathing tube. As for the Teodorescu family, the pool has been drained for now and a fence is going up.
And they are grateful for their miracle of medicine, and something else. “They did everything that they could humanly do, but the rest was God,” Caleb’s father said.
